Interview with Founder and Director Katie Orenstein in Columbia University’s “The Eye”

OEP Junior Fellow Ravenna Koenig interviewed Katie Orenstein for Columbia University’s The Eye on the importance of opinion forums in shaping thought leaders, what we can do to overcome our fear of putting our voices out for the world to hear and how youth expertise could enrich our public conversations. An excerpt of the interview is below:

As undergraduates, many of us are still working up the courage to put our ideas out to air in public, potentially facing fear of failure or criticism. What is the benefit of criticism in the public forum?

The thing about fear is that we all have it and it never really goes away. You want to shift the frame so that your life isn’t about fear, it’s about value. I used to teach literacy; they were all adults going back to school and they were the most amazing people. They read at a 6th grade level but they were people with deep life experiences and I thought we could get them something that had a more adult potential [like] Tuesdays with Morrie. I thought I would write to the author or the author’s agent and ask them to supply books for my literacy students. It’s something I never would have thought about doing, I would have been like, “is this a dumb idea? Should I do this?” The thing is, I looked at my students and I thought: they so deserve something that will address adult situations. Suddenly my entire conversation in my head was “I don’t care if this is a dumb idea, I don’t care what anyone thinks, they really deserve a book like that.” It just changed the way I though about it, and it changed the way I thought about almost everything afterwards. Fear of criticism is the same thing. If you are going to put yourself out there in the world in any way, if you say things or do things of consequence, there may be consequences. But the alternative is to be inconsequential. It’s a fundamental question of mattering.

And learning from criticism?
Ideas develop very slowly when left in one brain. The velocity of ideas and thoughts exponentially increases when you exchange them. Criticism is not bad. Criticism comes in all kinds of forms; sometimes it can be helpful to think of it as development of ideas.

The full interview can be read here

Freedom, Foliage, and the Final Frontier: End of September Updates

Hello everybody, this is Taryn (dedicated intern), here to catch you up on some of the latest OpEd Project successes.

There’s been so much action this week – with teams in NYC, Dallas, Chicago, and at Yale.  In Dallas, we presented to Women Moving Millions.  In NYC, we ran public programs and held media meetings.  Our Chicago team – Debbie Seigel, Michele Weldon, Katherine Lanpher and Zeba Khan — will be running a public program on October 1st, hosted by Northwestern University, with forty women in the room (a record).

Successes this week included:

*Qanta Ahmed published an op-ed on Saudi women in today’s NY Daily News, which was the most emailed article of the day. Qanta is now on her 20th published column since coming through OpEd project, many of which have been featured in the Washington Post and USA today. Read You Don’t Know Saudi Arabian Women. 

*Marielle Anzelone, an urban ecologist, had a gorgeous column in the NYT  this week on the beginning of Autumn –
 it’s the first of a 13-week online column on urban ecology that was offered her after she published her first op-ed ever in May, in the NYT print edition, after coming through The OpEd Project. Read: Autumn Unfolds in a Patch of Urban Forest. 

*Yale Scholar Laura Wexler (part of our OpEd Project at Yale fellowship program)  had a beautiful CNN column on the Troy Davis execution, and the unreliability of eyewitness identification and memory. As a result of this, Laura will be on Minnesota Public Radio today.  Listen to the interview.

*Also,Yale astrophysicist Meg Urry wrote a great CNN piece on the expanding galaxy – her fourth for CNN in the past few months that we’ve been working with her (she also did one for The Huffington Post). Yesterday, CNN offered Meg a monthly column, and potential TV spots.  Find Meg’s columns here.

*Finally, Fordham/Princeton scholar Carina Ray (we are launching OpEd Project fellowships at Princeton and Fordham both in the next two months) published an enlightening article in the Huffington Post this week titled The Gaddafi Mercenary Myth; and Sarah Fitts, who came through our NYC public program just this last weekend, published her persuasive piece Freedom is an Electric Car, also in the Huffington Post.

Wow.  What a week!

In the wake of Troy Davis’s death two op-eds beg attention…

OpEd Project Junior Fellow Ravenna Koenig weighing in:

News of the Supreme Court’s denial of a stay of execution in the case of Troy Davis and his subsequent death by lethal injection Wednesday night has been the cover story of publications across the country.

Just a day before his death Yale scholar Laura Wexler (a member of The OpEd Project at Yale Public Voices Fellowship Program) published a piece on CNN Opinion, calling attention to the unreliability of eye witness identifications. In the Troy Davis case seven of the nine witnesses recanted their testimony. In her op-ed, Wexler described her own experience as a witness in a criminal case where she found herself unable to identify a man she had seen at close range. This caused her to doubt the notion of the “rational spectator.”

“You can still choose an innocent man,” she wrote in a chilling acknowledgment of just how much is at stake when a witness points the accusatory finger.

In Wexler’s troubling account  we heard echos of an op-ed written by another member of our community. But this time from the other side of the bars.

In April The OpEd Project worked with John Thompson, an Echoing Green fellow (like us) and former prisoner who was exonerated after spending 18 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit (14 of them on death row). Thompson’s op-ed in the New York Times, “The Prosecution Rests, but I Can’t,” described how he was seized in his grandmother’s home and sent to prison thanks to false eye witness testimony. In addition, the prosecution in his case buried exculpatory blood evidence that eventually exonerated him. Thompson sued the prosecutor and his case went to the Supreme Court earlier this year. He is the founder of Resurrection After Exoneration, a nonprofit established to help exonerated prisoners reintegrate into society.

Both Wexler and Thompson bring essential, first-hand perspectives to the ongoing public debate on the complicated notion of “truth” in our legal system.

Following the execution of Troy Davis, demonstrators across the country have rallied to protest.  President Jimmy Carter suggested that the Davis conviction calls the whole death penalty into question. With stories like Wexler’s and Thompson’s, it’s easy to understand why.

OEP Team – Katie Orenstein, Katherine Lanpher, Janus Adams, Courtney Martin, and Annie Murphy Paul lead the second convening of our Yale Public Voices Fellowship at Yale University!

This past Sunday and Monday, September 18th & 19th, The OpEd Project visited Yale University where the second meeting of Yale Public Voices Fellowship took place.

Some comments from the wonderful OEP team on the Yale Seminar:

“OEP’s work is changing the way women scholars view themselves. The change in skill sets comes as a revelation; the change in the way they value their work makes way for revolution.” -Janus Adams

“[The seminar] was a reminder of how great the divide between cultural universes (that is, journalism and academia), even when they might seem to have so much in common… I think Katherine [Lanpher's] analogy to learning another language was really apt.”-Annie Murphy Paul

“It was an honor to be among so many brilliant scholars, not to mention OEP facilitators and friends… We managed to create a great blend of thought experiments and skill building, with small group intensives and workshop experiences… I walked away with such a deep trust in the scholars’ knowledge and such a deep yearning to see it make its way out into the wider world.” -Courtney Martin

In addition it should be noted that one of the seminar’s alums, Laura Wexler, had an op-ed published by CNN on Tuesday, the day following the seminar. Congrats Laura! You can read her incredible article on the pitfalls of eyewitness testimony here: <http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/20/opinion/wexler-witness-memory-davis/>

Building Thought Leadership in the Nation’s Capital: The OpEd Project Seminar on September 10th

Tarsi and Charsaree strengthen their arguments in the "That's ridiculous!" exercise

The brilliant women of the DC September 10th seminar show some "jazz hands"

Clare and Roxanne are deep in conversation, while Aditi chats with alums Kara and Jonnee in the background at the happy hour

The Last Word

Hello Byline readers.  My name is Taryn, and I’m proud to be The OpEd Project’s newest intern.  At the risk of tainting your first impressions of me, I’d like to make an unseemly admission:  I love to read obituaries.  These condensed biographies of notable people, most of whom I’ve never heard of before, help me to take a few steps back and put my own life into perspective.

That is why I was surprised to come across a letter* to The New York Times’ obituary editor, Bill McDonald, in which he is asked why approximately one of every eight obituaries in The New York Times was about a woman.

Apparently, I’d become accustomed to seeing fewer women represented in newspapers, because I’d never even noticed the disparity.

In McDonald’s gauche response, he cited The New York Times’ “high standards” as the reason for the imbalance, explaining that to be published a person’ death “has to be news to a national and international readership.”  He went on to make the case that the cohort of women and minorities dying today did not have the same opportunities to make news that white men had.  That is undeniable, but it is also true that editors subjectively curate their columns.  As a case in point, a quick search led me to two recently departed women who lived up to the “high standards” of The New York Times, but who were overlooked by the obituary section nonetheless (bio links below).

Newspapers of record such as The New York Times shape our personal perceptions and our culture.  These omissions matter.  To fulfill this responsibility obituary editors might have to broaden their scopes to catch what preceding generations missed.  And so, we return to the wise words, “Whoever tells the story writes history.”

For a look at an innovative obituary, check out this New York Times video obituary of humorist Art Buchwald, which starts with “I’m Art Buchwald, and I just died.”

*“Readers Views: Equality Among the Dead,” The New York Times, September 12, 2010, pg. WK11.

Shirley Eskapa, controversial author.  The Telegraph, 8-22-11.

Debra Evenson, expert on Cuba, professor, author, lawyer, and activist.  Chicago Tribune, 8-28-11.